Always
by TonyJace17
Summary: Because for them, staying together was both the best and worst thing. They just had to decide which way the scales tipped.
1. Chapter 1

Another of my role reversals, with Edward retaining his ability and what that ability might do to a normal person. This is…kind of dark with mentions of rape, death, abuse, and suicide. Bella is kind of dark in this as well and I have to admit their relationship in this fic isn't going to be entirely healthy.

I don't own anything

Xxxxxxx

The nightmares started when he was so young that he could barely remember not having them. He did remember the most vivid ones, though. He thought maybe it started earlier but he knew the worst started with a woman. She was dressed professionally, a badge hidden under her suit jacket. He was five and sitting in the cart among his mother's groceries, holding the candy that his mother had promised to buy him. It was what he was thinking about when they got close.

He saw the images then. She was thinking about a case she had been on, but he didn't really understand that at first. What he did understand was the horror of what she was thinking about. He saw a man and woman, laid out on the floor of their living room. Saw their eyes, open with gazes fixed. He saw the blood. There was a lot of blood.

Her thoughts were loud, speculating on what could have happened, on the pain the couple had to of endured. Edward couldn't help it. He screamed and he cried and he clung to his mother, begged her to make the images go away.

He had the nightmares for weeks.

Xxxxxxxx

There was a girl in his class whose daddy didn't like her very much. Her daddy was tall and big and she could never escape him. She thought about it a lot. Edward heard it. He saw the big man looming as if it was him and not her, felt it when the back of his hand connected.

Edward had to run from the class, with his teacher yelling after him, to escape it. The girl disappeared sometime after that, taken away by child services but Edward always remembered her and he sometimes still had nightmares about her.

Xxxxxxx

His classmates hated him. The hatred in their thoughts was impossible to escape. _Freak, _he heard over and over again and he could do nothing but shrink lower in his seat. He had freaked out more times than he could count during school and he always knew the answers to the teachers questions, sometimes even before they asked and his classmates hated him.

He wasn't normal. He was jumpy and scared to get to close to anyone and he hated his classmates just as much as they hated him. There was a boy two seats ahead thinking about beating him up after school. Edward sat in the very back of the class and drew continually on his notepad. He always did but his drawings were hardly ever positive things.

His teacher from an earlier class was a woman who had lost a baby to a miscarriage. She was worried she won't ever have a child of her own. Her thoughts were a swirling mess of dark and his drawing was too.

He let the kid two sets ahead beat him up. The physical pain, however, was not nearly as distracting as he'd hoped.

Xxxxxxxxx

Sometimes, he was sure his mother hated him too. Sometimes, she would look at him and wonder why he was so different. She didn't like what he could do. Didn't like that sometimes he answered her when she hadn't spoken out loud.

She hadn't really been close to him since his father had left, before he was born and sometimes he caught those thoughts as well. About how some dark part of her blamed him for it. That maybe he would have stayed if she hadn't gotten pregnant.

It was a small part of her that thought that and he could also hear the guilt that surrounded those kinds of thoughts but they were still _there_ and he could still hear them and there was a small part of him that hated her too.

By the time he was a teenager, being in the same room with her was almost too painful to bear.

Xxxxxxxx

His first attempt to end it came after what he still thought was the worst experience he'd had due to his curse. He'd been walking home, cutting through the backyard of a house several down from his own when he saw it and felt it.

At first it was the screaming thoughts of fear coming from a woman. It was so strong that he stopped and it brought him to his knees. There was a man, looming. He could smell the alcohol and felt it when the man pressed down on him.

He completely lost himself in her. In what was happening to her. So much so that he couldn't move and he fell to the grass on his back. Edward shook there. The man was there, punching and hurting and ripping at his clothes.

The man was taking off his own and then he was pressing forward, between, and then the pain came. Bright, white hot and it continued for several minutes. He could hear the grunts from above and he felt it when the man was finally finished.

When it was over, Edward was left shaking on the grass, almost surprised that he was fully clothed and not bleeding. He went home on shaking legs with tears still running down his face. In the shower, he scrubbed until his skin was raw but it didn't help. Then he spotted the razor.

He almost felt detached when it pierced his skin and it was a relief, not regret when he felt himself weakening. But his mother found him before it was over and he woke up sometime later in the hospital. He sobbed when he woke because it didn't work.

He sobbed because he could hear the grief coming off someone in the next room who had been told that their loved one will not make it. He sobbed because he couldn't take it anymore. His mother finally decided on a therapist.

Xxxxxxxx

He'd accepted it now. He'd accepted that his life will never get any better. He'd accepted that his curse will never go away. He'd accepted that he will never be able to get really close to someone.

Then he met Bella and things got both better and worse.

Xxxxxxxx

Hating herself was not an uncommon thing. Isabella Swan considered herself a pro in that particular area. At times, she felt every bit of her age. At times when she could sit perfectly still, lost in her own head, her mind wondering to the past.

Carlisle often said that she was too stuck there and she would hate him for that. She would hate him for saying it, for looking at her with real concern. She would hate him for the choice he had taken away so very long ago.

She often wondered what the point of her existence was. She flitted in and out of the Cullen's lives because, despite herself, she couldn't seem to break the one connection she had, but didn't often stay long to watch what appeared to be a happy family on the outside and almost was one on the inside.

She hated Alice every time the girl tried to guilt her into staying. She hated Jasper for being able to stay because he seemed to truly understood where she was coming from. She hated the small part of her that wished she could stay, that wished she could form a real connection and get past all that hatred.

She held onto her human memories, clung to them so that they wouldn't fade completely. Even the last ones, with her mother dead and her dying. She'd read a book once about a guy who wondered the Earth alone and how the oppression of loneliness had nearly destroyed him. She understood that.

_What was the point? _It was a question that plagued her, wouldn't leave her alone. Was she meant to move around with the Cullen's, repeating high school over and over again until it finally drove her crazy? Because it would, she was sure of that.

Was she meant to wonder the Earth alone until that drove her crazy?

She'd heard of humans that wanted to live forever and she didn't understand it. They didn't understand the real price of it. The real price of the never changing, loneliness of immortality. All they saw was the beauty and the inability to get hurt. They didn't see the full picture.

Hell, most of the Cullen's didn't either. Alice, even with her sight, would never understand. She was too shallow, too in the present. Too enamored with the prospect that she could buy whatever she wanted, do whatever she wanted.

Emmett…he was still too young, really, and he'd had Rosalie from the first moment he'd been turned. But Rosalie…she understood. She understood the price of it all. It was not the same thing, though. Rosalie wanted a family, children. Bella simply wanted the hollow feeling in her chest to go away.

Jasper and Carlisle understood. Carlisle had spent too many years wondering alone not to and the circumstances of Jasper's turning and the years after it had been brutal enough.

And, yet, still, Bella couldn't stay with them. They may have understood but they were still happy, to a certain extent. Watching them be so when she couldn't imagine it for herself only served to make that hole in her chest widen.

The real root of her hatred, despite all this, was the humans. She loathed them all. It was irrational and Carlisle had tried several times to get her to talk to him about it but she couldn't seem to help it. They were always there, tempting her, and taking for granted everything she had lost.

She hated them the most for that. She hated the ones who would want immortality at the price of their humanity. She hated them for everything she didn't have. And she hated them because they could disregard their own lives happily.

It was for these reasons that she found herself completely bewildered with herself for allowing herself to be convinced to move with the Cullen's when they came to Forks, Washington. The combined effort of the six of them had somehow convinced her to attend high school with the younger vampires in the group for the first time.

She was even more bewildered and frustrated with herself for allowing this when she found that she hated the children at the high school just as much as she hated everyone else.

Then she met Edward and things got both better and worse.


	2. Chapter 2

So, I've taken that whole "dazzling people" thing a bit further for this fic, almost into compulsion or glamouring territory to make it work. In fact, I'm basing it more closely off the compulsion the vampires use in The Vampire Diaries, only just a bit more breakable than theirs. Seeing as how the only way to break the compulsion they use is to either turn yourself or kill the vampire that compelled you, I wanted it to be a little less unbreakable.

Xxxxxxxxxx

_The really big, life changing moments were something that one tended to give up on when turned into a never changing, immortal being. Living forever, technically dead, things such as that either tended to be impossible or less important. _

_Things such as growing old and having children were taken away from you. And the smaller moments? Well, those moments meant much less than they should. Graduating high school took on little meaning when you looked ahead to realize that that diploma will never really be anything but a piece of paper that will end up in the trashcan. When you don't look old enough to be out of high school, much less college, your options become rather limited. _

_So, when the really big, life changing moment did happen, I didn't even recognize it. After all, upon first sight, all I saw was a scrawny, painfully introverted boy. And, like all the other humans I had come across in the last hundred years, I had hated him. _

_Even well into the unhealthy obsession that I developed after our first meeting, I hated him. Bitterness was something that I had draped around me like a blanket. It made me do things that I knew no good person would do. Yet I did them anyway. _

_And it all started with a scent…_

Imagining creative ways to get Alice back for dragging her there was really the only thing that kept Bella seated through her first three classes at Forks High School. She had already scared off several boys who looked at her as the new piece of eye candy.

The school was small, and apparently not much happened there, if the interest in her was anything to go by. She had had to threaten one of them to get him to leave her be. She conjured up several scenarios of what she could do for revenge.

"You wouldn't!" Alice exclaimed beside her as they walked towards the lunch room.

"No?" Bella tilted her head. Alice's horrified expression caused a smirk to form on her face. The girl was far too attached to her material possessions if she could get a look like that over the thought of her favorite clothes burning.

"Just give it a chance. You haven't even tried," Alice pleaded, using the same tone and expression she'd used to get Bella to attend the school in the first place.

"I don't need to try," Bella answered with a roll of her eyes. "I already know how utterly useless this endeavor is." She started away from Alice then, who looked worried. "I'm not leaving, just going outside for a bit."

There were several students eating outside, although it was much less crowded than the cafeteria. Several sat at the picnic tables set up along the grass. She scanned the area for a secluded spot, and finally started out towards the parking lot. That was when she caught the scent, just as she passed by one of the trees there.

The breeze moved just right, the scent washed over her and she froze. She was unsure later of how long she stood there, completely still, breathing in that scent. It was like nothing she had ever felt before.

Most humans held something of a temptation. A temptation to rip into them. It was one she could control, however. She had heard stories that there were humans that held more than just a temptation, though. Stories about humans that had blood that called so strongly that the vampire who it called to wouldn't be able to control themselves.

This, however, was the complete opposite.

It was like sinking into a warm bath after years of being denied one. Like sinking into sleep after a hundred years of being denied that. Utterly intoxicating in a different way than blood should be. She turned without even thinking about it first and there he was.

Sitting under the tree, back pressed against it, head bowed over the large pad propped against his knees and she knew, with certainty, that the scent was coming from him. She moved closer without thinking about it as well.

The closer she moved towards him, the more the feeling enveloped her until she felt as if she were drowning in it. He didn't notice her, didn't look up until she knelt and reached for him. She only noted the shocked green eyes briefly before she was moving into his personal space.

Xxxxxxxxx

For the first time, he didn't notice it when someone approached him. Edward had opted to spend his lunch period outside. It wasn't an uncommon decision. The cafeteria was always too crowded, and he felt incredibly claustrophobic there.

There were several kids outside too but not too many that he felt overwhelmed and he could, with effort, push their mental voices to the back of his own mind. He didn't eat. He usually didn't eat lunch at school, had usually lost his appetite by the time lunch rolled around.

Instead, he sat against one of the trees outside, and pulled out the large drawing pad that he kept with him. He flipped to a clean page, trying not to look at the drawings already there. Those kinds of drawings had gotten him into some trouble at certain points in his life but he couldn't stop. It actually helped, if only a little, to get them out on paper.

He was engrossed in the drawing but he still should have heard her approaching. He would have, if it had been anyone else. But he didn't, not with her, not until she was kneeling before him, reaching for him.

When he finally did notice her and looked up to meet her golden brown eyes, he froze, completely forgetting about his drawing. There was nothing. No mental voice screaming out at him. She was like a blank space, kneeling there before him and he was too surprised to do anything, say anything, when she started to lean into his personal space.

When she got closer, the others disappeared as well. For the first time while he was around other people, he was completely alone in his head and he leaned towards her as well, unable to help himself.

It was astounding how quiet it seemed without the constant buzz of other peoples thoughts in his head. The quiet was intoxicating. He was unsure of how long they were like that, sitting mere inches away from each other before the girl seemed to shake herself and broke the spell with a harsh question.

"What are you?"

"What are you?" Edward countered. He reached for her but she jerked back, and stood. She seemed to be debating with herself for a moment before she turned on her heel and walked away. Edward stood as well, staring after her.

As soon as she was gone, the mental voices of his peers came back, seemingly stronger than before and Edward had to curb the urge to run after her. He stood, pressed against the tree until well after the bell rang for his next class.

Xxxxxxxxx

Disgust. It welled in her after she had left the school. Disgust and anger. Disgust at what she had done, what she might have done if she hadn't snapped out of it. Anger at Alice because she most likely knew this would happen.

Disgust at the need that had welled in her as soon as she had left the boy's presence. The feeling that his scent had given her…she wanted it back. She had wanted it back from the moment that she had walked away.

"Bella?"

She spun at the voice, a scowl on her face. "You knew didn't you?"

Alice shook her head. "I knew something would happen here but not what exactly."

Bella stepped closer to her. "You're lying. You had to of known."

Alice's lips thinned and she shook her head again. "It's clouded. I knew that something major was supposed to happen here. I knew that you were involved. I knew it was supposed to happen today. But the details are clouded. I can't see what it is clearly. Whatever it is, it's important and I wasn't meant to see it."

"You still should have told me what you did see," Bella snarled, turning and starting away from the smaller vampire.

"You wouldn't have come," Alice called, racing after her, stopping her with a hand on her arm. "I was afraid you wouldn't come if I told you."

"I shouldn't have come."

"You were happy!" Alice yelled desperately when Bella started out again, stopping the other girl short.

"What?"

"Not a lot of it's clear, but that was. I got the sense that it's going to take a while but it was there. You, smiling, happy. I could see that very well."

The scowl on Bella's face only deepened. "Then you're seeing things wrong." She stalked out of the parking lot then, leaving Alice standing there with a pained look on her face.

Xxxxxxxx

Bella avoided the Cullen's and the house for the rest of the day. Her mind was preoccupied by the boy. She'd gotten his name and address from the secretary at school, had felt the need to do so strongly enough that it was as if another vampire had used compulsion on her.

Edward Masen. There should have been nothing spectacular about the boy. He was just a boy, after all. Just another in the multitude of teenagers that lived in Forks. And yet she couldn't stop thinking about him, couldn't stop thinking about his scent, and the feeling it gave off.

As the day wore on, and the need to be close to the boy grew, her bitterness grew with it. By the time that she found herself outside of his house in the middle of the night, she hated Edward Masen more than she had ever hated a human before.

The hatred did not stop her, however, from locating which room was his and getting inside of the house. The feeling came back strong as she stood beside his bed and breathed in his scent again. She sank down beside the bed, studying him.

He was a skinny thing with red tinted hair and a pale complexion that most likely came with living in such a perpetually rainy town. Still, his features were nice and if she were a normal girl, she might have thought he was cute.

What caught her eyes next, however, had the hatred in her chest growing despite the feelings of comfort and peace that the boy's scent gave off. He was lying on his side, his arms outstretched towards her and she reached for him when she saw the scars. Almost identical on each of his wrists.

The anger was muted when it came, due to the scent but it was still there, even so and she grabbed one of his wrists. He jerked awake at the touch, tried to pull away from her, his eyes wide and surprised.

"What are you…?" The question was breathless and she could see the fear that crept into his eyes when he was unable to break her hold on him.

"Shhh." Bella leaned forward, sighing when his scent became stronger, blotting out the anger and the hatred from before. "It's just a dream. Don't be afraid." She put the full force of her will behind the words and watched as his eyes glazed over. The fear left and he stopped trying to pull away from her.

He let her lean closer to him then. Her fingers traced over the scars on his wrist and she glared at him. "You're not to do something like this again. Understand?" Again, she said the words without thinking and he nodded mechanically. It was a petty demand, not a protective one, born out of the disgust over someone who would think taking their own life would be a good idea.

Some part of her knew this wasn't right. It wasn't right what she was doing to him but the need to get closer overwhelmed her again, making her forget her own dislike for the power she was using on him.

She pressed closer to him, and he let her because she demanded it.


End file.
